Review Summary: (feat. A Well-Produced Existential Crisis)
Basically, I think this EP is a melting pot, overflowing the way a glass of wine does when you’re not paying enough attention. Nick Murphy (FKA some guy who made a few songs with Flume) sings about that red-wine kind of love, or at least, uses this stumbling romanticism as a metaphor for his relationship with self. Nick probably thinks he needs these songs.
This is catharsis, I imagine he pontificates, as
Forget About Me slowly climbs the rungs of a broken old ladder. But although he croons about his quandaries like they’re public service announcements,
Missing Link forgets to make us feel like they are problems that will continue to exist on a different day.
Anyway,
That’s not to say the melting pot isn’t enjoyable or interesting. The production on this set of tracks is vibrant and full-figured.
Your Time pulsates and grooves seductively – composed as a rave song covered in a thick coat of fog, oblique and impenetrable.
Forget About Me’s Gothic cathedral introduction is chased away by the driving bass as if Nick is remembering his audience mid-performance. In
I’m Ready, his buttery falsetto glides over the syncopated beat, flooding into the gaps in the mix. It’s a moment that I think the rest of
Missing Link struggles to achieve in its internal tug-of-war – the lofty feeling that occurs when everything falls into place; where the misty curtains part and a solution is revealed. Maybe, the entire EP would be as dizzying in its elegance if Nick Murphy wasn’t so prone to self-imposed distraction.
Bye is a digression that makes me want to say as much to the record, with its punch-drunk acoustic strumming and shrill emergency droning that drowns out any semblance of restraint. It’s not so much a problem with the song itself as it is with the fact that it’s an ill-fitting transitional piece with nothing to contribute to the songs that precede or succeed it. And so I am left in two minds about this thing: it’s clean and it’s scattershot and it’s glossy and it’s pretentious and it’s evocative. It’s quite similar to Chet Faker, actually. I wonder if they’ll ever collaborate.
